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' U! . -. ::.,:.... .. -1: ... .............. .... .-.- n ,. The Lmkeepers' Register · the '92 guide to 250 wonderful inns $9 from Independent Lmkeeper's Aæxiation 8OO-3U-5244 blow theIr own horns) One afternoon in 1940, a year before he died, he went to a Hot Lips Page rehearsal in New York, and he asked Page what style his band was playing in. Page said Kansas City style, and Morton replied, "Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style, hell, they are all Jelly Roll style!" In a famous letter to down beat, written in the late thirties to counter an asser- tion made on a radio program that W. C. Handy invented jazz, he declared, "I guess I am one hundred years ahead of my time." Morton belongs in that curi- ous American pantheon of tall-tale he- roes, alongside Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed. I N the spring of 1938, the folklorist Alan Lomax, alerted by a jazz fan to the fact that Morton was playing in Washington, invited him to the Library of Congress to talk about his life. Lomax set up a portable recording machine in the Coolidge Auditorium and sat Morton down at a grand piano and asked him questions. At intervals over the next few weeks, Morton talked and sang and played into Lomax's microphone, and the results form one of the great Ameri- can autobiographies, or novels. Lomax fashioned a book out of the recordings, called "Mister Jelly Roll." Unaccount- ably, the Library has never issued the tapes, but independently produced sets have appeared from time to time. Vernel Bagneris and Morten Larsen Michael have based their show wholly on Morton's own words and music. T ARSEN opens the evening at Michael's L Pub with Morton's "Sporting House Rag," and Bagneris, standing in the dark at the back of the house, intones the opening words from the Library of Congress recordings: "As I can under- stand it, all my folks were in the city of New Orleans long before the Louisiana Purchase, and they came directly from the shores of France." Dressed in a natty royal-blue chalk-stripe suit and match- ing cap, Bagneris materializes onstage, looking uncannily like Morton, and es- tablishes his hauteur by telling us that his family often took him to the opera, where he heard "II Trovatore." Larsen plays an excerpt from the opera straight, then jazzes it up, Morton fashion, and we learn how Morton went about inventing jazz. Bagneris, who has a light, lissome baritone, then sings ''Mister Jelly Lord,' a funny self-tribute song by Morton ("The man's an angel with great big feet"), and begins a story about how Morton beat one Aaron Harris at pool, not knowing that Harris had killed eleven people, including his sister and brother-in-law. A lovely blues follows, and Bagneris sits down and smokes a cigarillo while Larsen plays Morton's "Pep." Bagneris sings 'Winin' Boy" and, during a Larsen chorus, goes into the fust of half a dozen casual, sinu- ous dances. They illustrate Morton's mu- sic. The old Harlem dancer Pepsi Bethel helped Bagneris with the choreography, and his steps, done on air and in a kind of slow motion, are fiùl of bent knees, fast side shuffles, pecking motions, pedalling, spins, and hip undulations, and they echo such dances as the Chicken, the Shimmy, the Eagle Rock, the Jig Walk, the Suzy- and the Shorty George. By now, Bagneris is Morton and, his voice low and amused, he demonstrates how, on arriving in a new town, he would don a fancy suit and strut casually down the main street, collecting admiring female glances, retire, put on another dazzling suit, and repeat his walk, telling his ad- mirers that he could change his suit sev- eral t1Illes a day for a month and never wear the same one twice. The songs and dances and stories slide beautifully by, and Bagneris ends the evening by reading Morton's obituary from down beat and by singing his mournful "Sweet Substitute," a touching example of Morton's occasional attempts to write pop songs. Midway in the show, Bagneris puts on a tattersall vest and tan trousers, and, while he's chang- ing, Larsen plays Morton's astonishing "Fingerbreaker," a roaring up-tempo dis- play piece with a rocketing left hand and shouldering right-hand chords (Morton used the piece to blow away other pianists; it's not srnprising that the Harlem stride pianists didn't care for him.) The piano never rests in Bagneris's show. We hear Morton's lacy, cluttered pieces; his direct, down blues; his volcanic fast numbers; and his rhythmic surprises, which trip you no matter how often you hear them. In less than an hour, Bagneris, with Larsen's indispensable help, creates a subtle, funny, graceful, haunting portrait of Morton, which makes "Jelly's Last Jam" seem crass and ugly. But the show at Michael's Pub should be longer. Bagneris puts us on Morton's right, and it's not easy to leave so soon. .